quiet lives

I wonder how many Americans aspire to a quiet life. I’d guess not many, and probably most of those skew toward the senior end of the age demographic. We tend more to think The Most Interesting Man in the World is a better role model than Mr. Rogers. We don’t want to fade into the woodwork, we want to be noticed. We want a voice, we want to be treated with respect. We want to be in the middle of things. We want others to look up to us.

Paul disagrees, which makes me suspect that God does too. Paul wrote this to the church in Thessalonica, in 1 Thessalonians 4:10-12 “. . . .  make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.”

I have had a lot of ambitions in life, and there are a few left, but they tended to be either accomplishments or experiential. I have had ambitions to military rank, to command, to climbing the corporate ladder. I have had ambitions to travel, to see all the national parks, for example. But I can’t claim to have ever had a quiet life as an ambition.

Mind your own business, Paul says, but he didn’t live in the time of Facebook and Twitter. On social media, everyone else’s business is my business. In fact, memes were invented to make it easy for me to make my disdain for others known. And haven’t we all made other people’s votes our business?

Work with your hands, Paul says, but he didn’t live in the information age. We’re a first-world country. We’ve moved beyond agriculture and manufacturing as the core of our economy, and even beyond being a service economy – we’re an information economy now, where most of our economic advantage comes from our ability to amass and leverage data. Work with my hands? The essence of the American dream is to get past that.

What I hear Paul saying to me is not to be so full of myself. I shouldn’t aspire to have power or influence over people, or to out rank them. I should be happy with honest labor and a focus on my own affairs; what other people are up to is out of my lane.

There are two good reasons for that, Paul says. If I truly live in such an unusual way, people will look at me with admiration and respect, which reflects glory back to God. And also, such focus and willingness to work will ensure that I don’t have to depend on others to support me.

So, a quiet life is a God-honoring life. It’s the opposite of our “look-at-me” culture, our “don’t dis me” demand for that others treat us like we're special. But it’s perfectly in keeping with the revolutionary example of Jesus’ life.